Navigating Excel Cells

There are a number of ways you can use for navigating excel cells in a workbook.

The most obvious one is to click with your mouse on a cell and this will identify the cell you want to work with. If you want to highlight a number of cells, you can just click and drag it around and what you’ll see is all the cells are highlighted. However with a very large spreadsheet, it can be quite difficult and could take a long time. So there are a couple of useful little tricks to know with regard to moving around in Excel. The first thing to learn about is the SHIFT key. If I click on a cell and I hold my SHIFT key down, I can use my arrow keys, it will highlight all the items next to my highlighted cell – if I click the arrow to the right it will highlight all the cells to the right. If I go down the entire area is highlighted. You can also click on a cell and while holding the SHIFT key down, click on another cell. All the cells between the two chosen cells will be highlighted. Another useful key to learn about is the CONTROL key. With the CONTROL key, you can tell Excel to look at a range of cells, for example, I’m on this cell (D15), if I hold my CONTROL key down and I push the down arrow, you’ll see that it runs across all the cells that have something in them and it stops at the last cell just before there is a blank. If I hold the CONTROL key down and I use the right arrow, you’ll see it has gone all the way along here to the cell just before this one here which is blank. So now I can easily go from one end of a range to another, just using the CONTROL key. The CONTROL key also allows you to pick individual cells without highlighting everything else around it. For example, I am on this cell (D15), if I hold the CONTROL key down and then I go to this cell (E16), you’ll see that both cells are highlighted, if I hold the CONTROL key down again, perhaps I want to highlight D21, drag it across you’ll see what has happened now is that only the cells I have clicked on are highlighted. Now it is also possible to use both the SHIFT and the CONTROL key at the same time. This makes it easier to do a number of things. If I click here (D15) , let’s say I want to highlight all these cells, all the way to the end in one move – what I can do is hold the SHIFT key down and you’ll be aware if I go across with the right arrow I will highlight these one at a time. However now go back. If I hold the SHIFT and the CONTROL key down and I push to the right what Excel has done, is because you are holding the CONTROL key down, it is going to go all the way until the last cell before a blank and because the SHIFT key was held down – all those cells that it has travelled over are highlighted.